2013-11-13T16:43:05ZToday Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life is 10 years old. It's true! Here's what the website looked like in 2003. Actually, that's not true. That snapshot is from February 2004, and it seemed we had had a site redesign before then. Why we decided to redesign the site after only three months I have no idea.

So if you look at that page you'll see that we were offering merchandise through a Cafe Press store. I bet you thought we sold out just recently! No, we've been greedy from the beginning. As it turns out, nobody outside of our family bought anything from that store, so, you know, learned our lesson.

Or did we? Look to your right folks. We got books, we got t-shirts. Wouldn't now be a great time to show your appreciation for ten years of... waiting for the next episode to come out?

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2013-09-20T17:07:06ZSomething interesting came to my attention from having NPWIL up on amazon. It seems that the comic is mentioned in this textbook. I vaguely remember giving someone permission to do this, but I never thought I would see the result. It's just a tiny mention and a single panel, but they do call it "a witty and erudite episodic journey." Plus, look at all the people for whom this was required reading. Cool.

Anyway, the books are probably not going to get any cheaper, so, i mean, I know how frugal you are... go on.

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2013-09-09T14:21:53ZOk. The second half of NPWIL is finally available on Amazon. Now would be a great time to get them both. Check it out.

Also, I neglected to mention that the books are also available from the Amazon Europe sites as well. Might save some of you some hassle.

Anyone who gets the books, let me know what you think. I know nothing compares to infinite canvas, but I'd like to know if you think the transition was successful.

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2013-09-02T12:01:55ZVolume One of Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life is now available. You can get it here.

Volume Two is in the final stages of proofreading and should be out in a week or so. Opplopolis Volume One will follow next month (don't want to bring everything out at once, you know.)

I'm pretty pleased with the way the books have turned out, and I hope you all are as well. I was a little worried that the panels I was forced to redo would stand out from the others, but this was not the case at all. And it actually feels pretty natural to read on the page. A pretty good product all together.

So, there you go. I'm going to be promoting this in an uncharacteristically aggressive way, so don't be surprised if you see it in other places. Keep checking in for updates on Volume Two and the Opplopolis book.

And don't forget that we have t-shirts as well. I've gotta make some more of those.

I put up a free preview of the NPWIL book on Gumroad. Have a look if you're curious about the format. I ended up going with a 2x2 grid instead of 3x3. Since there are nine panels, that meant creating a lot of extra art. You can see some of it in the preview. EDIT: when it asks you to name a price, just enter 0. You don't have to input any info.

So, this is just about finished. We crunched some numbers and determined that the best way to do this will be to publish the comic in two volumes, both about 150 pages. Volume one will have episodes 1-49, volume two will have the rest. The book will be 8.5in square (which is why we had to make the panels bigger.)

Should look pretty good. I'll let you know when I have a physical copy in front of me.

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2013-08-12T14:06:29ZI had to reproduce the paintings in the museum episode for print. I decided to do so in a kind of crude MS paint way. No skill involved, just slapdash copying, but I thought the results were kind of cool.

View image to make them big.

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2013-08-08T12:46:07ZThis may take some explaining, but it's good news, I promise.

When I started NPWIL I made sure to save print-resolution versions of all the artwork, thinking that in a couple of years when the project was finished I could bring out a book. Well life intervened, two years turned into eight, I upgraded my computer a couple of times, and when I finally went to retrieve my backups, I found that a large part of them were missing. About a quarter, in fact.

So I moped about it for a while, then I spent a while trying to cheat my way around the problem, and finally I accepted defeat and started in on reproducing the missing panels. Fortunately, I was able to locate a lot of the original drawings on paper, and all those episodes required was a scan and recolor. Unfortunately, a large number of drawings had to be reproduced from the web versions. Very tedious.

Well, this is to announce that I'm finished with that as of last night. The entire book is now sitting in an InDesign document with only a little formatting and editing left to take care of (yes, I have already corrected dozens of typos, and no doubt a final proofread will catch many more.) Besides that, I need a cover and an intro, and then I can see about getting this thing printed.

So that's ok, right? I'll let you have a look at the cover when that's done. Maybe sell a poster of it, if it's good enough.

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2013-07-05T14:20:52ZWow, is this late.

Almost two years after it ended, I finally designed a NPWIL t-shirt. You can get one here.

We actually had a store when this comic first started. Never sold a thing, except to ourselves, of course. I had a beer stein made with that long panel from the end of episode 9 printed on it. That was pretty cool.

Anyway, I figure some of you could wear these shirts as ironic reminders of your super-hip childhoods, the way someone my age might wear a shirt with Danger Mouse on it. That's an amusing thought.

It's also a tease for the printed volume, which I'm projecting for next month. Yes, I know I projected it for a year ago December, but that was before I realized how much of the original art had been lost. If you're frustrated, imagine how I've felt having to reproduce this stuff. We're almost there, now, so hold tight.

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2013-01-21T17:07:16ZBe sure to update your bookmarks and stuff to the new site.